Questioning Alpha Leadership

Just as we thought our attention spans were collapsing and our thoughts reducing themselves to what could be texted or tweeted, the magazine The Atlantic published a nearly 13,000-word cover story by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton University scholar and former Obama administration official. It was about whether educated professional women can still have it all: Can they be involved mothers and superstar workers and perfect wives? And it concluded that, in the world we inhabit in America, they can’t.

The essay went ferociously viral in America, at least among the intelligentsia — and rippled out to the world. Ms. Slaughter found herself on one television broadcast after another. A Twitter dialogue, employing the hashtag #HavingItAll, flourished. Women and men alike passed the article around through e-mail.

The controversial crux of Ms. Slaughter’s argument is this: that alpha women with alpha opportunities should, if they wish also to be mothers, accept beta careers. This is not to say that women should aim lower, Ms. Slaughter says. Rather, women should become content with peaking later (but still peaking at the top) and with a leadership trajectory of “irregular stair steps, with periodic plateaus (and even dips)” when needs and impulses beyond work require it.

Ms. Slaughter also suggests — though without much hope of imminent change — that men with children could elect similarly structured careers, and that employers could do things to make the beta path more of a respectable option.

But because these other changes — implemented to a large extent in places like Scandinavia but seemingly distant in the United States — are likely to take years, Ms. Slaughter’s advice to career women boils down to unilateral disarmament. “If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal,” she writes.

The essay serves, then, as a primer on being a beta woman in an alpha world. Yet the larger question it raises, but does not answer, is whether the society is well-served by having so many alpha leaders in general, whether male or female.

At times, Ms. Slaughter suggests that her sympathies are with a wider beta-ness. “Seeking out a more balanced life,” she writes, “is not a women’s issue; balance would be better for us all.” But she is tolerant of the notion that long hours are inevitable in the elite jobs she describes. And she is less concerned with changing that fact than with finding ways for women to fit into it: suggesting, for example, that they might gain, through technology, the chance to do late-night videoconferences from home rather than meetings at the office.

Because Ms. Slaughter focuses on the practical choices facing working mothers, she doesn’t address the question from another important angle: Does it makes sense for the rest of us to be governed, to have our money managed, to be educated by people as single-minded, obsessive, fierce, hurried and self-serving as the brainy elite she describes?

Her essay captures the ways of the American professional elite in vivid detail. She observes that the “culture of ‘time macho’ — a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you — remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today.”

The implication of this observation is that the people who run America are not just harder-working, smarter versions of the average person. They are, in many cases, differently constituted, with different values, morals and priorities. They are a class unto themselves — even, perhaps, an interest group.

In a period of historic public distrust of this nation’s institutions and leaders, could the horrendous lifestyles that are a requirement for admission be a contributing factor? It is at least plausible to think that, if you select high financiers according to their willingness to work 100 hours a week and ignore their families and outmaneuver peers, that you are going to get a disproportionate number of self-serving, less-than-empathetic people managing society’s money.

Consider, alternately, that so many of the government servants who craft the country’s social policies are people who happen to have prioritized the making of social policy over their own families. What biases does that give them?

The most tantalizing question Ms. Slaughter’s essay raises is whether aspiring leaders of all varieties — male and female, parents and not — should seek out the stair-step, late-peaking, home-office careers she suggests to working mothers.

If such careers go mainstream, it could be hard on some. Employers that have gotten used to squeezing more hours out of the same people might find themselves having to hire more. It is possible that some kinds of work — the invention of things like Google and the iPhone; investment-banking transactions; diplomatic activity during crisis, on which Ms. Slaughter labored — intrinsically require 18 hours a day of one indivisible person’s attention.

But it might prove easier for working mothers to follow Ms. Slaughter’s advice when other workers who are not mothers choose the same, more relaxed careers for their own reasons. They may do so not to raise children but to have what we could call life space. Parents fill that space with children; others may ponder a start-up idea, write a book, tend to an aging parent or reglue a marriage drifting apart.

Can the beta career become aspirational for everyone, rather than a concession to working moms?

The question that Ms. Slaughter’s essay left is whether working mothers are a special situation, or really just an extreme distillation of the situation we all face. Is the only reason not to work past midnight that you have children?